Science and Products

What if you could find the location of any park or protected open space in the United States? By zooming in on a map you could see detailed boundaries and all nearby protected lands, and you could analyze these data to inform decisions about conservation, recreation, or land use planning.

A Gap Analysis consists of mapping three data layers — land cover, predicted distributions of vertebrate species, and a stewardship layer depicting both location and conservation status of protected areas. This data is then assessed to determine how much of a target species’ (plant or animal) habitat is in conserved areas.